Dryden recalls MacNeil making him Canadiens starter for 1970-71 playoffs

MONTREAL -- Nothing suggested that the first round of the 1971 Stanley Cup Playoffs was going to be anything but a breeze for the defending-champion Boston Bruins against the overmatched Montreal Canadiens.

The Bruins were the NHL’s best regular-season team, their League-leading 121 points 24 better than the East Division’s third-place Canadiens. Boston’s 399 goals scored were 108 more than Montreal’s 291; the Bruins’ 207 goals against, second only to the 184 allowed by the West-leading Chicago Black Hawks, was marginally better than the 216 surrendered by the Canadiens. Boston’s goal differential of plus-192 was a ridiculous 99 goals better than second-ranked Chicago.

But few expected Canadiens coach Al MacNeil to come at the Bruins, and then the Minnesota North Stars and finally the Black Hawks, with a goalie who wasn’t yet even a rookie, a lanky law student with all of six NHL games to his credit.

Today, Ken Dryden looks back to 1971 as he considers the late MacNeil -- first as a signature in his 1950s schoolboy autograph book, then briefly as a teammate with Canada’s national team; one unforgettable stretch as his coach in Montreal; then a decades-long friend.

Canadiens coach Al MacNeil behind his team’s Montreal Forum bench during a 1971 game.

MacNeil died on Sunday at age 89. The native of Sydney, Nova Scotia won the Stanley Cup three times with the Canadiens -- as coach in 1971, then as player personnel director in 1978 and 1979 -- and once more with the Calgary Flames, in 1989 as assistant general manager.

It was MacNeil, likely with some input from Canadiens general manager Sam Pollock, who took the calculated risk of starting Dryden against the powerhouse Bruins in 1971. And it was MacNeil who rode Dryden the entire 20-game postseason, through a seven-game first round, six-game second round against Minnesota and a seven-game Final against Chicago.

“I would have seen Al around the Montreal Forum (early in 1970-71) as an assistant to Canadiens coach Claude Ruel,” Dryden said Monday from Boston, reflecting on his path to the NHL that saw him earn 1983 Hall of Fame enshrinement as the NHL’s dominant goalie of the 1970s, a five-time Vezina Trophy winner that decade.

Ken Dryden in action.

The 23-year-old was on the roster of the American Hockey League’s 1970-71 Montreal Voyageurs, the Canadiens’ minor-pro affiliate.

“At Christmas I decided I could become a full-time player while being a full-time law student (at McGill University),” Dryden recalled with a laugh. “I’d signed a new agreement with the Canadiens and then I played something like 30 games in a row with the Voyageurs after that time until being called up.”

Dryden was one of three goalies sharing Canadiens dressing-room space, Rogie Vachon backed up by Phil Myre.

“I’m the third guy but thrilled to be up with the Canadiens,” he said. “I’m not anticipating anything at all. I’m just there, I’m at practice every day. But after about five or six days and about three games or so, the only thing that bothers me is that I’m not even dressing as backup. I’m up in the press box. I’m thinking, ‘Don’t worry about not playing me but it would be really interesting to just dress as the backup, to be in the dressing room, to see what it’s like.’ ”

From left: Phil Myre, Rogie Vachon and Ken Dryden on Montreal Forum ice, the three goalies part of a Canadiens rotation late in the 1970-71 season.

Dryden finally got the call to make his NHL debut on March 14 in Pittsburgh against the Penguins. He’d make 35 saves in a 5-1 victory, beaten only by John Stewart late in the second period.

“By this point the Canadiens are surely, solidly in third place, not in any danger of going to fourth or of going to second or first,” Dryden said. “This is the Bruins’ year, they’re dominating everything. The New York Rangers and Chicago are really good. That’s the way it is.

“Nobody ever told me but I thought that if it goes OK against Pittsburgh, potentially I might get slotted in somewhere else. If that goes well, maybe another. That’s how it went for the last month of the season. I ended up playing six games during that time.”

Dryden won all six, which produces one of his greatest statistical footnotes: he won the Stanley Cup and Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player of the postseason not only before he won the 1972 Calder Trophy as the NHL’s best rookie, but before he’d lost a single regular-season game.

Ken Dryden (l.) and Rogie Vachon in the Canadiens dressing room at the Forum.

The Bruins were steaming toward the playoffs, the Stanley Cup seemingly theirs to lose. Their first-round series against the Canadiens set, MacNeil called his three goalies into his Forum office with three games left on the schedule: March 31 at home against Boston, April 3 at home against the New York Rangers and April 4 in Boston.

“I’d played enough and done well enough that there started to be some things written in the media that maybe they’d be considering me to play in the playoffs, or at least be part of this discussion,” Dryden said. “This was totally out of nowhere because for me, it was ‘play a game and you might get another.’ That was it.

“I don’t know what Rogie and Phil were feeling going into our meeting with Al but there’d probably been a story written speculating who was going to get the Wednesday home game against the Bruins. We knew we’d be facing Boston in the first round so it seemed that whoever played that Wednesday game would open against the Bruins, which made complete sense.”

Ken Dryden turns away Chicago’s Cliff Koroll during 1971 Stanley Cup Final action at the Montreal Forum.

Vachon got the call for that game, Dryden was tabbed to start against the Rangers and Myre would finish the schedule in Boston.

“Rogie’s got experience (204 regular-season games), I have next to none (five) and Phil has only a little bit more (39),” Dryden said. “Al told us he wanted each of us to play a game the final week. I remember hearing all of that and taking it in the way I best understood it -- Al was leaning toward playing Rogie as the playoffs began.

“As we’re all walking out -- for some reason Rogie and Phil were ahead of me -- without me saying or indicating anything, Al just said to me, ‘Don’t worry about who’s going to be playing which game, we’ve got something in mind.’”

More than a half-century later, Dryden considers the assignments each goalie was handed in MacNeil’s office.

“Rogie and Phil got the worst jobs and I got the least worst job,” he said. “Even though the Wednesday game was at the Forum against the Bruins, we had nothing to play for and the Bruins had lots to play for. They were on the verge of setting all kinds of team and individual records. They were going to present the best Bruins on that night. We were not going to be the best ‘us’ in the that game. Or on Saturday against the Rangers. Sunday in Boston was not going to be a fun game for Phil to play.

Ken Dryden watches defenseman Jacques Laperriere prepare to clear Montreal’s zone, Chicago forward Stan Mikita giving chase during the 1971 Stanley Cup Final.

“The Bruins blew us out 6-3 Wednesday night, we ended up beating the Rangers 7-2 on Saturday and the Bruins blew us out again on Sunday, this time 7-2.”

Bruins sniper Phil Esposito scored a hat trick in the final game, giving him a historic 76 goals for the season.

“Al and Sam (Pollock) and whoever else the discussion might have involved might have been thinking this,” Dryden said. “I think they imagined that if things didn’t go wrong in my game against the Rangers, they didn’t want the Bruins to open the playoffs against a goalie who had been shell-shocked against them, which as it turned out was going to happen on Wednesday and Sunday.

“They wanted to give the Bruins a fresh look. Somebody who they hadn’t seen before (Dryden had never played the Bruins). That would be the best chance of the playoffs turning out differently and it would give me the best chance to do fine because our team was going to be at its best. That was just the way Al was.”

Defenseman J.C. Tremblay prepares to rush the puck, Canadiens goalie Ken Dryden looking on with Jacques Lemaire in the background during the 1971 Stanley Cup Final.

History records that Dryden went 12-8 in the postseason with a .914 save percentage and 3.01 goals-against average.

The Canadiens stunned the Bruins in seven games, an unexpected stick in the hubbed spokes of Boston’s seemingly smooth ride to a second consecutive championship.

On home ice, Boston won the opener 3-1 and was cruising 5-1 midway through the second period in Game 2 when the roof of the Garden caved in. The Canadiens scored six unanswered goals to win 7-5, Dryden remembering MacNeil coming into the dressing room after 40 minutes, suggesting the Bruins, then up 5-2, were playing loose hockey and could be beaten.

The Bruins were up 3-2 in the series when the Canadiens crushed them 8-3 at Montreal, then eliminated them 4-2 in Game 7 in Boston.

The second round against Minnesota wasn’t a rout, Montreal needing six games.

Then came the seven-game Final against the Black Hawks and what arguably was the greatest of Dryden’s 13,166 career saves, the Canadiens clinging to a 3-2 lead in the final minutes of Game 7 at Chicago Stadium.

Sport Magazine editor Al Silverman presents the keys of a new car to Canadiens’ Ken Dryden, the goalie chosen as the publication’s 1971 most valuable playoff performer. NHL president Clarence Campbell looks on.

It was a stunning stop on the late Jim Pappin that froze time, the Black Hawks forward seeing the equalizer on his stick die in the goalie’s right pad, Chicago’s Stanley Cup hopes perishing with it.

“Chicago had the puck behind our net and passed it in front,” Dryden recalled. “For some reason, (Chicago defenseman) Keith Magnuson was in the slot, which seems odd to me in that he was not an offensive player at all. Why he found himself there, I’m not sure. His shot went right at me, along the ice, and it hit my stick and deflected out to my right.

“Literally between the moment he took the shot and the moment I stopped it, I knew I’d have to make the save and already be moving to stop the rebound. Usually they’re separate and discreet, but this was one movement, where the first part of the save was blocking Magnuson’s shot and the second part was throwing out my right leg for what I knew had to come next.

“The puck deflected out to Jim Pappin but I was already in the process of moving to stop his shot before he had taken it. He shot it into my leg.

“What I remember, vividly, was the strangled sound, first of ‘Yaaaayy ...’ and seeing his arms start to go up in the air -- and then his arms and voice stop.

"It seems to me there was some moment (later) that Jim and I were together, with someone else, and he made a passing comment like: ‘I’ve had to talk about that shot and that save all my life.’ And he laughed.”

Dryden would win the Stanley Cup that night, and five more times that decade. All of them are meaningful, of course, but today, he is remembering getting the playoff call of his late friend Al MacNeil in 1971, and 20 games that remain among the most important in the goalie’s body of championship work.

Top photo: Ken Dryden with the 1971 Conn Smythe Trophy which he was voted as most valuable player of the postseason.